


Sunlight & Moonshine

by kazra



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-02-22 19:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2519201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kazra/pseuds/kazra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She used to think of humans like machines, and sometimes she still did. It helped her compartmentalize. If she could pretend she knew how people worked, if they were as easy as metal parts and color-coded copper wires then she could understand more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunlight & Moonshine

**_one_ **

That was one thing she would remember—the quietness. 

When the crackle of the radio faded out, when the person on the other end stopped talking and all she could hear was her own breathing even and steady, her breath fogging up the visor of her helmet. 

Sometimes she’d pause in the silence, turning away from the Ark and stare out at the stars. Dark nothingness, freckled with pinpoints of light that were the only way to give spatial reasoning to the void. 

“You’re wasting oxygen, Reyes,” crackled her radio. She turned back to work.

She’d never felt so calm as when she was in space. There was something soothing about it, the weightlessness. Just her in her spacesuit and a mission to fix something that needed fixing. Easy day. 

She was at ease here, away from everyone else on the Ark and her mind could just shut up for one second while she held her familiar tools and walked through the familiar steps—diagnose the problem, come up with a plan to fix it, execute it. 

She was used to this, the way it made complete sense to her. She knew the Ark—the hum of it’s engines, the battered but durable metal walls and floors, the thick UV protected windows through which she could view the Earth, the sun, and the moon. She was used to being a zero G mechanic; floating in the vast emptiness, a single cord the only thing keeping her attached to her small civilization. 

She was used to fixing things. Mechanical parts made sense—if something was broken she could replace it with a new part, tinker with the screws and bolts here and there. She was used to space suits and small hologram screens that showed levels and statistics. Every part had a purpose, everything working towards keeping the machine working and moving and when things broke down she could fix it. 

It hit her at the most inopportune moment, trying to fix the gravity engine in station 3. 132 people had been afloat for hours already. 

Raven kept her life like a well-oiled machine. Organization was key, work to keep her busy, and Finn, the boy who kept her grounded. The emotional tie that kept her tethered to the Ark, like the cord that kept her from drifting away from home. She lost herself in his steadiness, the way he could save her by just taking her hand and kissing her on the lips. She would fall asleep next to him at night, at least until he got himself locked up a month ago.

It was like a punch in the gut, feeling the sudden _wrongness_ of her situation. _Alone_ hurt like a brick wall for a moment, and a wrench slipped out of her fingers. 

“Reyes,” crackled the radio.

“Sorry,” she replied, and made a wild grab for it. The wrench hit the tips of her fingers and launched off, twisting and turning into space in perpetual motion, forever. 

Raven breathed, watching the wrench float away. 

“Raven,” the voice on the other end groaned.

“I have another one in my tool bag.” She pulled it out of her bag, got back to work. She tried not to think about the wrench—it would be coming out of her pocket, certainly. Resources ran thin nowadays. Everything that could be recycled was, and anything lost to space was a setback no matter how small it was.

Lost in space. Raven tried not to think about how that might apply to her.

**_two_ **

At first it was exactly like spacewalking. Undocking from the Ark had been a little rough, but then she was floating through space again and it was fine, because she knew what she was doing. Her little drop-pod drifted towards the Earth, spurred by little blasts of air she used to drive it. 

Raven could spacewalk. She remembered the first time she had been out in space with Finn, nothing but space suits and a tank of oxygen. Drifting, floating. An object in motion will stay in motion. 

She remembered Finn’s smile through the visor of his helmet. The way Earth looked with his silhouette against it. And later, asleep in his arms.

Floating was stasis. The Ark was stasis—a constant state of being, day in and day out the same thing. But same was never _bad_. Raven liked routine and knowing what to expect. For 97 years the Ark had orbited the Earth and it was the same. People were living. Until, inevitably, they started dying.

But space was all she knew. Space was her constant.

Then she hit the atmosphere, and it _burned_. Falling was the opposite of floating. Gravity had never been this harsh to her, there had never been this much space to fall through. Miles and miles and miles before she hit the earth. This wasn’t the Ark’s artificial gravity that kept it’s occupants glued safely to the floor. This was true gravity. This was the planetary pull of the Earth, the crushing shock of reentry, from zero G’s to too many all at once. This gravity could kill her. 

She wondered if she looked like a shooting star. She didn’t feel like one.

The impact was even more damning than the fall.

**_three_ **

Earth wasn’t as stable as she thought it would be. The difference was like an earthquake that threw her mind into a state of chaos and confusion. The shock made her feel like the ground was shaking beneath her feet. 

She instinctually knew that the ground was no place for a space girl like her. This place wasn’t just wild—it was _feral._ Raven learned quick enough that they weren’t the only ones out here, and if the delinquents weren’t killing each other then there were Grounders out there who would happily do it for them.

She knew there was no way to get back up to the sky. She was going to die here. At least she wouldn’t get floated.

And Finn—it had only been ten days.

The little two-headed deer stung more than it should have. Raven stared at it, tears burning behind her eyes.

There had only been one time before.

At first he’d tried to deny it. Say nothing had ever happened. Then he tried to say that it didn’t matter, he hadn’t felt anything. Like it would have changed the fact that he fucked some other girl.

She had to forgive him, though. He had cried even harder than she had, begging her to take him back, and in the end she had to console him, tell him how much she loved him, how she would always forgive him. She thought about that other girl sometimes, the one who wouldn’t look her in the eyes in the mess hall.

She hadn’t gotten a little tin animal.

Ten days—the most important constant she had known in her life suddenly not reliable anymore. This new girl, Clarke. The Earth shuddered, vibrations so deep they sunk into her bones.

Ugly rage, jealousy, hatred filled the cavity in her chest, roiling and spilling over, pouring black sludge out of her mouth that sounded like spite and tasted like tears. 

Briefly, she turned to Bellamy. Not really a friend, but not an enemy somehow. They were working towards the same goal, at least. She didn’t forget that he shot the Chancellor, or destroyed her radio.

“The blonde girl,” said Raven. Bellamy raised his eyebrows.

“Clarke,” he said, nodding. His eyes flicked towards her, some emotion bubbled to the surface that Raven didn’t really care to read in to.

“What’s she like?”

Bellamy hesitated. “She’s… something else.” He gave her a sideways glance, as if debating whether or not to go on. He didn’t.

_Something else._ Raven thought about the girl with soft eyes but a hard stare, the girl who brought Finn back from the brink of death, who was the first person she saw on the earth and greeted her like an angel.

**_four_ **

She used to think of humans like machines, and sometimes she still did. It helped her compartmentalize. If she could pretend she knew how people _worked_ , if they were as easy as metal parts and color-coded copper wires then she could understand more. Sometimes she could hear the _whirr-click-thump_ of her own machine parts working when she closed her eyes at night and it took a lot of repeating words until they became meaningless to bring her back from these thoughts.

_I’m real, I’m real, I’m real._

It was a long time before Finn could coax out of her the idea that the pain in her chest were faulty lung parts that needed to be taken out and fixed, put back in all shiny and new so that nothing hurt anymore. 

He took her to the infirmary because he thought she had a cold. That wasn’t the problem—she hadn’t diagnosed the problem yet.

She knew that humans, like machines, broke down sometimes. Parts fell out of alignment and some things just stopped working. Not all of it was fixable. 

She saw it happen to her mother. During the times that she _did_ see her, at least, sucking down the poison that eventually killed her like it was water.

Organs like machine parts that started to fail until it was too late for a replacement. Stuck gears, loose wires, dying from the inside out. Her mother’s body slowed down until one day she stopped moving altogether.

Raven was going to die here. She knew it when she was coughing up blood alone in the forest, when the sky above the treetops exploded into a mushroom cloud of ash and dust, and later when she held back the burning behind her eyes by sheer force of will, listening to Finn whisper those three words that had been playing inside her heart since the first time he uttered them. And for once, she had been unable to say them back.

“Not the way I wanna be loved.”

She had to start thinking about how she wanted to die, here on the ground. Fighting, most likely. What other way was there to die?

And she had to start thinking about how she wanted to be loved.

She imagined sharp blue eyes, pale skin, and hair like soft-spun gold. Thin arms wrapping around her, fingers twisting through her own dark hair. She could die in those arms. Again, and again, and again. 

**_five_ **

Raven ached for the void. Being in space was like being able to feel the universe in her bloodstream. She missed the weightlessness she had been unable to feel since the crushing gravitation pull of reentry, the burning of the atmosphere. She missed being able to sense light years in every direction.

She decided to drown her sorrows the old fashioned way. She procured a jar of moonshine from Monty and hid herself in her tent, drinking the foul smelling liquid and reveling in the way it numbed her mind. She grimaced with each sip. It tasted even more bitter than her resentment. 

Some time later there was a rustle at the entrance of her tent.

“Go away, Finn,” she spat. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“It’s me,” said Clarke, pausing. “I just wanted to know if you were doing okay.”

“Oh,” said Raven softly. “You can come in.”

Clarke entered the tent. Raven swallowed the last dregs of moonshine from the jar, her throat burning.

“I, uh… heard what happened,” Clarke said uneasily.

A short, biting laugh bubbled out of Raven like acid, sizzling into the air and cutting into Clarke’s nervous silence. “Yeah. You can have him. If you still want him.”

For a moment, Raven was worried Clarke still did. 

“Can I sit down?”

“Join the party.” Raven’s words sounded slow to her own ears, burdened by the alcohol that had long since passed a buzz in her veins. Clarke sat down next to her on the makeshift bed of piled blankets. 

“Is this… something you want to talk about?” asked Clarke carefully. 

“What’s there to say? He fucked her. Then he fucked you. Now I have no one.” Raven picked at the edge of a blanket, looking down.

“I’m really, so, so sorry,” said Clarke.

“’S not your fault,” Raven mumbled. Clarke scooted a little closer. Raven was immensely aware of her presence. Clarke stroked her hair, and Raven jumped slightly at the touch, then closed her eyes to it.

“There’s the rest of us. Jasper and Monty. Bellamy, kind of. And… and me.”

“Finn was…” Raven struggled, trying to convey the huge part of her life that Finn had meant to her. She couldn’t, with the alcohol working against her like this. “I thought he could fix me,” Raven whispered numbly. She’d always thought of herself as some sort of broken machine. Maybe the parts didn’t fit right, or something was missing, maybe that’s why her mom didn’t want her. It helped, having Finn—someone, anyone who wanted her. She thought he was the solution. Now he wasn’t.

Clarke cupped her hands around Raven’s face gently, angling her face upwards to look at her. “Raven..” Clarke whispered, shaking her head. She smiled at her, pushed her hair back behind her ear. Raven held her breath.

Slowly, ever so slowly, in case she was rejected, she leaned forward, eyes locked with Clarke’s until their faces were too close and she looked at Clarke’s lips instead. 

Clarke closed the rest of the distance and their lips met. Raven’s fingers wound their way into Clarke’s golden hair. It was soft, like she imagined it. She knew it would be soft. 

Clarke was gentler, her hands finding their way to Raven’s waist, pulling her a little bit closer, tracing lines up her back.

It had never felt this natural—Raven had never felt this _human_. She was so aware of her blood rushing to her cheeks, the pounding of her heart, and the fluid way her body moved with Clarke.

She was also still feeling the effects of the moonshine, and all at once it hit her like a brick wall. She could feel her movements turn from passionate to sluggish.

Clarke trailed soft kisses down her jawline and neck. Raven felt too drunk and sloppy to be deserving of this kind of gentleness. 

“Clarke,” she breathed, her voice a little uneven. “I just… I need to sleep.”

“Oh,” Clarke said, her breath tickling Raven’s neck. Was it just her, or did she sound a little hurt? “Okay,” said Clarke, and that was definitely hurt in her voice. She stood up, turning to face the exit.

“Wait,” said Raven. “Stay with me?”

Clarke paused, and for a moment Raven thought she would leave, but she turned around smiling. “Yeah, of course,” she said.

Raven sunk down into the blankets and Clarke followed her, curving her body around Raven’s and curling her arm around her stomach. 

The moonshine led her quickly into a dreamless sleep, emptiness and stars.

**_six_ **

Sometime in the early hours of the morning Raven woke up with a pounding headache. Light was starting to fade in through the thin walls of her tent. Clarke’s arm was draped around her, her body still curved into the shape of hers. The residual effects of the moonshine in her system fogged her brain a little bit in a sleepy, if somewhat painful, kind of way.

“Clarke,” Raven said.

“Hm?” Raven could feel the vibration of Clarke’s voice, she was pressed so closely against her.

“I think you taste like sunlight,” Raven whispered. Was that a dumb thing to say? Clarke laughed. The sudden noise made Raven’s head hurt a little more, but she didn’t care. 

“I think you taste like alcohol,” Clarke said.

Raven grinned. Her hand found Clarke’s and she laced their fingers together. 

“Time to get up and save the world?” Raven asked.

Clarke sighed, the little puff of air tickling the back of her neck.

“Nah,” she said. “Let’s just stay here for a while.” 

Dawn hadn’t truly broken yet—they could probably sleep in a few more hours before anyone would try to find them. Raven closed her eyes. The two girls breathed in unison, hearts beating together. Pale light stretched thin, tender fingers through the trees, throwing dappled light onto the walls of the tent. 

This was how Raven wanted to _live_.

 


End file.
